Haha I was kind of hoping for some fantasy too, but it isn't as big a deal to me.

We have time until we reach any stage where we'd need to consider magic, maybe we can come up with a compromise then? Maybe some kind of slow magical force that permeates? I dunno. Or nothing at all! Remember guys, we have time on our side! Just don't die and we should be fine.

Out of curiosity, since we're at the start of this, instead of trying to fit tectonics onto an existing Map 4, do we just want to start with a generated Pangaea, cut it in spots, and then extrapolate it out? Ovi was showing me a thread yesterday at the Cartographer's Guild that laid out a very similar process. It wouldn't take that much longer and now that we have a couple more experienced players in the game it could be pretty great.

Thoughts? Remember there's no rush and there is plenty of time to discuss!

Well the whole tech idea would not be "magic" but could appear like magic. Such as make there are microscopic nanite clouds that for all intensive purposes do the same things that magic can do if programed to do so. So maybe a mage is just someone who has learned how to code them to do things. Would be interesting if magic tomes were really just computer tablets. And things like "Anti-magic" would be like EMP stuff. Metals like Mithril are really just Advanced Alloys. And scrying or looking into magic mirrors are just TV screens and remote cameras.

Technically plates move in arcs (which is why they seem to move in more than one direction). But yeah, for the simplicity of this game, we should use straight lines.

Really, once the tectonic plates are set and the mountains/trenches drawn in, I don't see them playing much of a factor in the game. If they're moving in 'multiple' directions, that really just allows us to place mountains/trenches where we want etc. However, I don't think that matters because based on Hydro's interpretation, the map looks like it has some pretty interesting stuff going on already anyway.

And as for fantasy, it would at least be cool to have animals that don't exist, even if they're not fairies and stuff, we could take a sci fi approach and just have weird animals

I'm not opposed to woolly mammoths or giant sloths since they did exist in the same time frame as humans, but I'm iffy about anything beyond that. I could probably be persuaded either way. I might be getting ahead of myself, but when we start looking at placing cultures in the Stone Age, I think it would make sense to have a ground zero for humanity and then migrate peoples away from that point. There could be several initial groups that move in different directions from ground zero which eventually branch further into more diverse peoples that settle the world. This could add some interesting backstory between cultures rather than just plopping people around the world and trying to come up with a creation story for how they got there.

And I definitely like Pat's idea for introducing disasters into the game. We'll need some crushing catastrophes in our history, not just constant forward progress.

That little island I wanted to drop my civ on looks like it's totally gonna be volcanic which is cool

The other thing is a proposal for where to have this human origin point - the mountain range on the bottom of the Western continent is a sort of "U" shape - what if the inside of the U was a very fertile area (a place for humans to start) and the outer, coastal part was arid and beachy? I think that'd be a cool starting point

As for the dawn of man or whatever. Was discussing some of it with Ovi yesterday. What if we start off with humans in one location and work on them for a couple turns. After maybe two or three turns we could have an event or something: "Humanity migrates!" and a new group that has reached some level of sustainability will appear at a different location on that starting continent or something. Every few turns we could leapfrog outwards and add another wing of human settlement.

For the plates, yeah I kind of saw it like Ovi and Jos are describing it. We can use it to help get an idea how the world looks early-on. And afterwards we can remember those fault lines and locations for event planning, but otherwise we aren't going to be locked down on ten million years of geological history. :U

And as if to illustrate the worry above, we went from maybe some minor magic elements to outlining magic and anti-magic, armors and materials, and a giant open door for more. I'm starting to lean more towards the "no-magic" side of this discussion now. The slope is very very slippery. If we're talking nanite clouds and whatnot... well, let's delve into those issues when our made-up civilizations are advanced enough to have that discussion along with us. :3

My thought was that we start the human stage at the literal dawn of man, equivalent to approximately 250,000 years ago. We'd then play their spread throughout the world until we reach the point where the first permanent settlements appear. As humanity spreads, differing races and cultures would appear and even though some parts of the world would start to settle, there would still be lots of societies that remain "uncivilized." I mean, we still have some of them today! That way, it feels more like a living, breathing world and less like a game of Civilization.

Elves and Dwarves are new subspecies of Human. The Elves came about though living on low gravity worlds and got taller and thinner. While the dwarves came about though high gravity worlds and became shorter and stronger. The dwarves lived on a world with higher radiation and thus had to live in underground colonies. Which is why their culture is so subterranean. While the elves lived on terraformed garden planets with emphasis towards nature.

Half elves would be still half Elf and Half Human, but perhaps Halflings could be half dwarf half elf and Gnomes could be half Dwarf and half Human. Orcs could be genetic super soldiers. And half orcs could be the the offspring of those with humans (maybe even the other sub-races too).